1. Harvest date vs best-before
The harvest date is when the olives were picked. The best-before date is when the bottler expects the oil to stop tasting like itself, and it is the bottler’s own guess: EU law sets no shelf life for olive oil, so a best-before of eighteen months from bottling is a convention, not a measurement. Oil can sit in a tank for a year before it is bottled, which is why a best-before alone tells you very little.
Olive oil is a fruit juice. It does not improve in the bottle. Everything that makes an extra virgin worth paying for — the green aromas, the bitterness, the pepper in the throat — is at its peak the week the oil is milled and declines from there. An oil from the October 2025 harvest bought in October 2026 is a year old; the same oil bought in March 2027 is eighteen months old and will taste of it.
2. What the law requires
Under EU Regulation 2022/2104 a bottle of extra virgin olive oil sold in the Union must carry the category name and its legal definition (“superior category olive oil obtained directly from olives and solely by mechanical means”), the designation of origin at the level of a member state, the Union, or a third country — or a blend statement — the net volume, the best-before date, storage advice, and the bottler’s name and address. Blends of EU and non-EU oils must say so.
The harvest year is not on that list. It may be shown, and only if every drop in the bottle comes from that harvest; a bottler who mixes two seasons cannot print either year. Some member states have gone further under national law — Italy requires the harvest campaign on oils bottled there — but across the EU the honest bottler prints it and the others do not.
| On the label | Required? | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Category: extra virgin | Yes | Passed the chemical limits and a taste panel found no defects |
| Origin (country / EU / blend) | Yes | Where the olives were grown and milled — at country level only |
| Best-before | Yes | The bottler’s own estimate; no legal basis for the length |
| Harvest year | No | When the fruit was picked — the one date that measures freshness |
| Cold extraction | No | Oil was extracted below 27 °C (if the claim is made, it must be true) |
| Acidity | No | Free fatty acids; if shown, must be accompanied by peroxide, wax and UV values |
| Variety, estate, mill | No | Voluntary; useful when a producer gives them |
What EU Regulation 2022/2104 requires on a bottle of extra virgin, and what is voluntary.
3. “Cold extraction” and “first pressing”
“Cold extraction” has a legal meaning: the oil was obtained at a temperature below 27 °C by centrifugal separation of the paste. “First cold pressing” means the same thing done on a hydraulic press, which almost nobody uses any more — Biolea on Crete is the one estate in this library that still does. Both terms are optional and both are checked: a bottler who prints them must be able to show the extraction temperature.
In practice nearly every quality extra virgin is cold extracted, because heat drives off aroma. The term distinguishes good oil from industrial oil, not good oil from better oil. A bottle that says “cold extracted” and nothing else about harvest or variety is telling you the minimum.
“Cold extraction” rules out the worst. It does not pick out the best.
4. Acidity on the label
Free acidity is the share of fatty acids that have broken loose from the oil’s triglycerides, expressed as grams of oleic acid per hundred grams. The extra virgin limit is 0.8%. It is not a taste — you cannot detect 0.2% against 0.5% on the tongue — but it is a record of how the fruit was handled: bruised, delayed or fermenting olives give higher acidity. A figure of 0.1–0.3% says the fruit went to the mill quickly and whole.
Acidity may be printed only together with the peroxide value, the wax content and the ultraviolet absorbency, all in the same typeface — the regulation forbids using a low acidity figure on its own as a selling point. That is why most labels leave it off and the producers who publish it do so on a technical sheet instead. We print it in each oil’s laboratory panel, with who measured it.
5. Reading a bottle in the shop
Turn the bottle round and look for a harvest year first. No harvest year, no sale, unless you know the bottler. Then the origin line: a single country is better than “EU blend”; a region or estate is better still, and a variety better again. Dark glass or tin beats clear glass, because light is the fastest way to ruin an oil on a shelf. Price last.